Tag: thankful

Excellence Knows No Age

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We watched Down Periscope tonight. I’ve loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks.

I quote it more than I should. There’s a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at his new executive officer, and says something about him being a little young for the job.

Rob Schneider straightens up and says: excellence knows no age, sir.

It’s a joke. It’s also true, and I’ve thought about it more than a comedy line probably deserves.

My son is in the middle of a painting challenge right now — a series of watercolors, a different theme each time.

He showed me the collection tonight. Spread out, all of them together.

They’re good. Not good-for-his-age good. Good.

I’ve never had any interest in painting, but I’ve always drawn. I still doodle while I think — always have, half the margins of my life are covered in it. And what I put on a page is not in the same category as what he puts on one. He draws it, then he paints it, and it’s finished, and I’m looking at it.

I’m thirty years older than him and I’m not close.

Here’s the thing I noticed about myself tonight, standing there looking at his work.

Nothing in me wanted to compete with it. Not a flicker. I was just proud of him and glad to be looking at it.

And I compete with everything. I keep score on myself constantly — I’m not as far along as I should be, I haven’t had the success I wanted, I still haven’t found the groove in half of what I’m doing. Writing included. I run that tally in the background most days.

But not with him. I don’t grade myself against my son and I never have.

Which makes me wonder who I think I’m grading myself against the rest of the time.

The honest answer about the writing is that I haven’t been at it long. Not seriously, not the way I’ve been at it this year. I’m early. Early looks like failure if you compare it to someone who isn’t.

He’s early too. He’s just been early at the right thing for longer, and he practices, and it shows.

He put them all back in order when he was done showing me.

Ok, So Now What?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I’d hauled it up there myself.

Toward the end I’d go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people who had no idea I was up there.

What I remember turning over in that chair wasn’t how do I fix this. It was where do I go from here.

I found out over the next eighteen months, and the answer was: five jobs.

I had a sociology degree I couldn’t do anything with. My wife worked while I applied for things and didn’t get them, and after a couple of months of that I put on the best clothes I owned and talked my way into selling art at the Thomas Kinkade gallery in the mall.

I knew nothing about selling. I knew nothing about Kinkade. The paintings were pretty.

The model was this: a new piece would come out, and we’d work a list of everyone who’d bought before. I still remember most of the script. Hi, my name’s David, I’m with the Thomas Kinkade Gallery — we know you’re one of our loyal customers and we wanted to say thank you. Tom’s got a new piece in. Based on what you’ve bought before I really think this one’s a fit. Can I get you to come down and see it?

At twenty-four that felt like the stupidest thing I had ever been asked to do. I didn’t have the money to buy anything in that store and I was supposed to stand there talking about the work like an expert who loved it.

I never made a single call. Not one, the whole time I was there. I sold a few pieces to people who walked in the door, and the rest of the time I wrote poetry in the back.

I lasted under two months.

Pizza Hut next. Assistant manager, about six months.

They made an enormous deal about management trainees putting in forty-five hours a week — and then didn’t always schedule forty-five hours, and told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t hit it anyway.

There was also a thing at closing where you’d estimate how long your final tasks would take, clock out with that estimate, and then stay and finish. One night I clocked out about thirty minutes long and the district manager came by and I wasn’t there.

He accused me of cooking the books and fired me the next day.

That one was on me. I put the number in and I left before the number said I could. I wanted to go home; it was midnight. But it was my hand on the keypad.

Then a month spraying lawns in Oklahoma City. Weed killer and pre-emergent. That was the shortest one, and it ended for reasons I’ll leave alone.

Then February 2004. My mother had been quietly watching for anything I could do, and a friend of hers worked at an insurance adjustment firm that needed an office manager. That’s the job I’ve written about before — the one where the owner eventually offered me a dime.

Youth pastor to art salesman to Pizza Hut to lawn spray to office manager. Eighteen months.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I sat down and started writing a book called Okay, So Now What?

I still have the opening. It’s about being sold a lie — a degree that was supposed to guarantee a career and didn’t. And the diagnosis in it is correct, which is the part that gets me. Twenty-four years old and I wrote: I never sat down and planned out what I was going to do. I took the blame cleanly. I didn’t blame the university, I said the choice was mine.

Then I wrote this: This book is not as much for you as it is for those of you out there who are just like I was, clueless.

I was unemployed. I had no plan. I’d been fired twice in a year. And I sat down to teach other people how to plan their lives.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until much later.

I’m forty-seven now. I could deliver that Kinkade script today with a completely straight face, because now I know what it’s for. It’s not a lie. It’s an invitation to a person who already likes the work, offering them a thing they’d want to know about. Every business that’s ever sold anything does some version of it, and the ones who do it well are doing a service.

Nobody ever told me that. Nobody said here’s why we call, here’s what it does, here’s the person on the other end and what they get out of it. I was handed the script and pointed at the phone, and because I couldn’t see the why, I decided it was beneath me and wrote poetry in the back of a store I was failing out of.

That’s the pattern. Not laziness. I’d have run through a wall for someone who explained the wall. I was headstrong and certain and completely willing to work — and utterly unable to move on anything until I understood what it was actually accomplishing.

Nobody came alongside me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not anywhere in that stretch.

The kid in the papasan chair should have been keeping a journal. He wrote a manual instead.

I’ve spent this year trying to do the work rather than theorize about it — documenting what I’m going through instead of teaching from the far side of it. It took me until my forties to work that out. Turns out I got the posture wrong the first time I ever sat down to write something for other people, and then didn’t notice for twenty-three years.

I could still be saying the sentence I was saying at twenty-four. That if somebody would just lay it out in a way I could act on, I’d go and do it.

Nobody is coming to lay it out. I make the plan or there isn’t one.

I am not twenty-four anymore. There are times I have to remind myself not to think like he did.

Three Hundred Dollars

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars.

I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came up front. It all came at the end. I could not make the leaders understand that college students still have bills that show up monthly whether you’re at camp or not.

Mine were a credit card minimum payment and a Sprint phone card, and the phone card was because I kept calling a girl in Oklahoma City from that camp. She’s been my wife for twenty-seven years.

I called my mother first to ask whether Grandma would even consider it. She said, for you, I think she probably would.

So I called Duncan.

She got quiet. Not upset — the kind of quiet where somebody is taking in what you’ve just asked and has decided not to react until they’ve finished thinking about it. Then she said, that’s some money.

She was right. She was a nurse who’d raised four daughters, married to an oil man, and they had means. She’d never once spent like it.

She didn’t mail it. I had to come get it.

So I told my leaders I had bills to pay and drove ninety minutes from Davis to Duncan, and she put cash in my hand at the house she’d lived in my entire life.

I told her I’d pay her back at the end of the summer. I told her she had my word.

The check came in August. I was in Edmond by then.

I drove back down to Duncan — a weekend, knowing me. I called first. I’ve never been a man who shows up unannounced.

I put the bills in her hand and told her thank you.

She said thank you too. And she got a look on her face I have never been able to name properly — pleased and proud and satisfied, all of it at once, all at the same time.

Grandpa was out mowing, I think. I stayed long enough for pie or brownies or cake, whatever she had, and visited a while, and drove back to the city.

Thirteen years later she was dying at home, in that same house.

A few weeks out, I arranged to come spend a morning with her. She sat in her sitting room with her legs kicked out and her pain medication beside her, and we talked for a good while. Two of my aunts were there. I made breakfast for all of us, and I got to show off a little, and I told her about my family — my son was five that year. He’s eighteen now.

At some point my aunts stepped out and it was just the two of us.

I told her I loved her and that I was thankful for her. I read her a letter I’d written for her.

And she watched me the whole time with that same look. The one from the money.

That was the last time I saw her.

I’ll be forty-eight before long, and I still miss my grandma and being looked at that way. She loved me. I love her.

She never said a word about the three hundred dollars.

What I Didn’t Say

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In January of this year I used an AI tool to help me edit my novel. The chapter that came back wasn’t mine.

Same characters, different scene. Events I hadn’t written, in a book I’d already spent a hundred and five thousand words on. I got about halfway down the page before I stopped and said out loud, what the heck is this?

I’d asked for everything I could think of. Check the voice for consistency. Tell me if I’ve dropped a plot thread. Fix the grammar, look at the pacing. Everything you’d want from an editor, and I thought I could name all of it.

What I never said was don’t change the story.

I asked it why afterward. It told me my instructions left room and it had filled the room. Which is a fair description of what happened — I’d written a job posting with no scope, and something with no other context to work from took the widest reasonable reading of it.

I’ve known for a while that the gap was mine. What took longer was working out why it was there.

I’ve never worked with an editor.

Not once. Everything I’ve ever written I’ve edited myself, the long way, reading until my eyes slid off the page. So when I finally handed a chapter to something outside my own head, I was specifying a job I had never in my life watched anyone do.

I knew editing existed. I could name the tasks — anybody who’s read a book about writing can name the tasks. What I couldn’t name was the line. Where this sentence is weak ends and this scene should be different begins.

That line isn’t in any book about craft. It’s the kind of thing you absorb sitting across a desk from somebody in your first year, and after that nobody says it out loud again, because everyone in the room already knows it.

So I listed the parts I could see and left silent every part I’d never had to think about, which turned out to be all the boundaries.

You can’t put a fence around a field you’ve never stood in.

What I built afterward was a standard set of instructions I’ve used on every chapter since. Read for these things. Tell me what you find before you touch anything. Suggestions first, not revisions.

And the one that actually mattered: when you do revise, revise my words — I want it to still be materially mine when it comes back.

I’d never have thought to write that sentence if I’d worked with an editor even once. It would have been assumed. It’s assumed by every writer and every editor who has ever sat in a room together, and I had to lose a chapter to arrive at it from scratch.

The chapters started coming back the way I’d wanted them the first time. My sentences, tightened. My scene, still mine.

Twenty years of writing and I’d never once had to define what an editor does, because I’d always been both people. The handoff happened somewhere inside my own head, and nothing that happens in there ever needs saying.

So the instructions weren’t really for the machine.

They were the first honest description I’ve ever written of a job I’ve been doing to myself, alone, since I was in my twenties.

He Fell Forward

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I  started a project at the beginning of this year called Bible Pictures 365. I started making the pictures so I’d actually read the Bible.

That was the whole design. I’ve got a plan that takes you through the entire thing in a year, and I know myself well enough to know that a plan alone doesn’t do it. So I gave myself a job: one image per chapter, every chapter, posted. Miss the reading and there’s nothing to post, and the empty slot is the accountability.

It also solved something else. I wanted to see it. Not a painting somebody made in 1840 with everyone dressed like Europeans, but a guess at what the room actually looked like. Dirt, heat, the right kind of bread.

And I wanted it to reach somebody. That part was in the plan too — I’ve had a number in my head all year, a thousand people, and this was one of the ways I meant to get there. Two accounts started from zero, posting into the dark and hoping.

What I didn’t plan for was being graded.

Early on I did David and Goliath. Stone hits the giant in the head, giant goes down. In my version he falls backward, which is what you’d expect and what looks right on a screen.

The text says he fell on his face.

I have gotten, conservatively, twenty comments about it. Probably more. People still find that one and tell me.

The first few stung a little. Then I understood what I was actually looking at. Twenty people knew that verse well enough to notice the direction a man falls in a sentence most people skim. They didn’t scroll past a nice picture. They checked it against scripture and found it wanting, and then cared enough to say so.

That’s the whole thing working. I set out to build accountability for myself and accidentally handed it to a few thousand strangers.

The messages come from everywhere. Corrections, mostly kind. Questions about how I make them. People telling me a specific image landed on them in a way they wanted me to know about.

Somebody once asked me to make one on request. It’s the scene where an enemy commander runs from a battle, hides in a woman’s tent, falls asleep exhausted, and she drives a tent peg through his temple. That’s in there. That’s in the Bible.

I got it to where you understand exactly what happened and it’s still fit for a phone screen. I’m oddly proud of that one.

Judges gave me more trouble than I expected, and not the parts people assume.

What sat with me was how fast it repeats. Sodom gets destroyed, and not many pages later the same wickedness turns up in a town belonging to Benjamin, and it ends with a woman cut into pieces and sent across the country as a message. The tribes nearly wipe Benjamin off the map over it.

I couldn’t make an image for most of that, and I didn’t try. But I read it, which was the point. Every generation in that book thinks it’s different from the last one and none of them are.

Job was harder in a quieter way. You know from the start he didn’t do anything wrong — you’re told, the reader gets to see the ledger. Then you sit there for thirty-some chapters while his friends explain his sin to him. And Job holds up, and holds up, and then eventually gets a little too big for his britches and God has to take him apart.

The part I keep coming back to isn’t the suffering. It’s that his friends were the first ones to throw him under the bus.

Eight months in, I’ve changed almost nothing about how I do it.

Same format. Generate the scene, put music behind it, post it with the verse. It started as a six-second video because that’s what the app gave me, then it became ten seconds because that’s what the app gave me. Every choice in the process was made once, at the beginning, mostly by whatever was available that week.

I want to be honest about what that is and isn’t. It isn’t boredom. I still like doing it, most nights it takes me twenty or thirty minutes, and I’m not white-knuckling anything.

It’s that nothing has broken. The posts land a few hundred views, occasionally a thousand, and the number has been about the same for a long time. Which is exactly the condition where you don’t change anything — nothing hurts enough to make you.

If I started tomorrow I’d probably put myself on camera. Read the verse out loud, say what it did to me that morning. I’ve never once done that on those accounts. I don’t have a good reason.

I’m into August now. Still going.

When the year ends I don’t think I’ll shut it down — maybe it becomes one picture a day instead of one per chapter, whatever actually hit me that morning. I haven’t decided.

What I do know is that some man in another country is going to open his phone, look at a picture of Goliath, and check which way he fell.